


Bear It No More

by hitlikehammers



Series: No End To This Thing [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 'Til the end of the line, And Back to Oneself, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Reclaims His Selfhood, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes Returns, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Credits Scene Fix-It, Feelings, Fix-It, M/M, So Very Many Feelings and Tears of Joy and Other Such Emotive Things, Supersoldiers in Love, T'Challa is Better Than You, The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell, Wakanda, Welcome to the Vibranium Capital of the World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 06:06:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6742027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“A man in great mourning once wrote,” T’Challa closes his eyes, hums a bar that’s vaguely recognizable before quoting softly:</p><p>“It is well, with my soul.”</p><p>Bucky’s mind goes to pews, and to hymnals. Bucky swallows, and closes his eyes. He doesn’t know if he can do that, if he can <i>feel</i> that; if he’s even <i>capable</i>.</p><p>But he can damn well <i>try</i>.<br/> </p><p> </p><p>  <b>SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR.</b><br/><span class="small">Direct follow-up to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6693928">Such Bitter Refuge</a>, which—again—is fixing that one particular mid-credits scene.</span></p>
            </blockquote>





	Bear It No More

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Bear it no more](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7099246) by [Pearlson613](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pearlson613/pseuds/Pearlson613)



> Direct follow-up to [Such Bitter Refuge](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6693928), detailing what exactly comprises Bucky's rehabilitation in Wakanda (and after).
> 
> Title credit [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Is_Well_with_My_Soul); love as ever to [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad) <3

They want to put the arm on first.

The amount of trust they show in him makes Bucky question their intelligence, a little.

“No.”

He’s firm on that. He won’t risk the danger of what taking the triggers out, the last of those chains, that bondage—he won’t risk what _freedom_ , honest and real and true, might manifest itself like, in him, with a premium-grade cybernetic arm to aid whatever hell may still be left inside him to wreak. 

The technicians frown, uncertain, but T’Challa is there—and Bucky’s grateful for him, in ways he can’t put in words, this stranger who’s become a friend, become an ally and a bearer of his impossible weight in the blink of an eye, and Bucky’s fucking _grateful_ —but T’Challa is there, and he meets Bucky’s eyes and understands him without Bucky having to explain, waves off the medical staff prepping the arm and conveys the consent to proceed with what Bucky damn well _prays_ is the last wipe his brain’s ever going to need.

“We have perfected the process on a psychological level,” one of the technicians steps forward; “but physiologically, we have yet to eliminate the discomfort. There will be some pain, but we have developed an anesthetic—”

“No,” Bucky says again, equally firm.

“Sergeant?” the technician frowns, looks to him first, and then to her king—who, this time, tilts his head in askance, can’t see for certain why Bucky denies them.

“No, I,” Bucky swallows hard, doesn’t know if he can explain the deep need to be able to know, after the procedure—even a benign one, meant only to help, to _save_ —but he needs more than memory in his head to be sure of it. He needs, he... 

“I want to feel it,” Bucky says, because he’s allowed to want, and he wants to be certain. “It needs to,” he shakes his head, fumbling his words before he takes a deep breath and just _says_ it, and puts his trust in T’Challa to know what it _means_.

“I need proof. To be sure, to,” Bucky closes his eyes; grits his teeth: “to remember that it’s real.”

He needs to know it in his muscles, in his skin and bones: just in case.

T’Challa considers him carefully for a good long stretch of time before nodding.

“You do,” he says, but there’s an edge there, something cryptic and hidden: “for now.”

Bucky nods his thanks, and T’Challa smiles, if grimly, as the mechanisms are attached to his head, the monitors attached to his chest.

“You need it now,” T’Challa murmurs, coming close and taking Bucky’s hand, a comfort in this that he’s never had before, and it’s so strange, and welcome, and it’s that same skin-and-bone _knowing_ , and Bucky thinks T’Challa is wiser than most people; than anyone Bucky’s ever known.

“For now, Bucky,” he says, just as the procedure begins; “But not for much longer.”

_______________________

He makes them say the words before he lets them attach the limb, after.

 _Longing_.

God, he knows longing. He’s known longing, it feels, since he’s known how to skip a rock on water, how to tie his shoelaces; since he’s known anything at all.

 _Seventeen_.

God, seventeen. He remembers being seventeen. Remembers sitting, and watching Steve’s too-thin chest rattle up and down and putting cool rags on his skin to break the fever all while trying not to freeze the boy he loved like sunrise and breathing in the dead of winter; he remembers looking at Steve and realising it wasn’t just for now, just because. It was everything. He was everything.

Seventeen was a hell of a year.

 _Homecoming_.

The only thing he wanted. The only thing he still wants. The one thing that may be outside his reach, but home was never a place, and so it wasn’t just his choice.

Which made it hard.

 _Freight Car_.

And that, that bit also made it hard, but for all the loss hitched to trains, for him, for them, it was also a promise.

Til the end of the—

_Soldat._

He blinks. He looks at the man who’s been speaking, meets eyes that don’t hold fear, exactly, but aren’t at ease, and Bucky’s first inclination is to calm that hesitance, to reach out and—

Oh. _Oh_.

He looks around the room—bare minimum, just in case—and he feels his face nearly fucking crack for not having stretched like this around a smile in decades.

“Nothing,” Bucky says, breathless and overcome and his heart is fluttering wild enough to make him dizzy with all of it at once.

“It’s,” he gasps, giggles, sobs; “ _nothing_.”

His chest is rattling with the force of his pulse, his breath is coming uneven and sharp and weightless and holy fucking _Christ_ , but _Bucky_ feels weightless, light-headed, and this. 

“Oh my god.”

 _This_ , he remembers, is what joy feels like.

“Did you doubt us?” T’Challa steps forward, quirk to his lips as he raises a brow knowingly, with light in his eyes as he witnesses what Bucky _knows_ is himself, finally coming back to life.

Because he can fucking _feel_ it. 

“No,” Bucky breathes, and it tastes different: breathing. The air. The _world_. “No but,” he shakes his head, and it’s only with the motion, and the way it sways his hair across his face, hair that catches in the quick-hot stream of tears that are flowing from his eyes as he shakes, as he laughs, as he sobs and grabs T’Challa first by the shoulder, grip firm, and then says fuck it, and hauls him in for a hug, and oh, fucking _hell_.

He’s _alive_ again.

“Thank you,” he breathes, shudders as T’challa returns the embrace, firm and gentle all at once, bracing him in a way so that when Bucky slumps a little against his solid presence, no one would ever know he was holding Bucky up.

“God,” Bucky exhales, and he thinks the weight of the world starts to slide out from his lungs, impossibly, improbably, but yes.

Yes.

“God, _thank you_.”

_______________________

He’s almost excited, on the coattails of that kind of joy, to get the arm fitted: to look at metal crafted of generosity, and gifted to do good.

He’s almost _itching_ to see what _that_ kind of arm is capable of—even if, still, there is hesitance in him. The triggers are gone. His mind is his own. But T’Challa had been right.

It wasn’t just about the memories. About control.

But he still leans in to the feeling of balance when the arm registers, syncs with the remaining tech—upgraded now, of course, by his gracious hosts—and its weight, a perfect balance, natural rather than burdensome for the very first time.

It feels like a _real_ arm. He doesn’t even hesitate when T’Challa reaches, grasps his hand in a firm shake in aid of the technicians calibrating and documenting his response to the limb.

He doesn’t hesitate.

But he really should have.

It’s a gut punch, honestly; it takes all the wind from him, and sends his heart jackhammering, and his head spinning, because, because—

“It,” Bucky gasps, eyes wide as he looks up at T’Challa; “it’s, you...”

He can _feel_. Not just the bare necessities of function, pressure and temperature and some texture, enough to fit a weapon inside a weapon and decimate what sat at the other end: no. 

He can _feel_.

“I told you,” T’Challa says gently, releasing Bucky’s hand and letting him choose just how much of this impossible return of sensation, this impossible rush of emotions he can stand to hold, but Bucky scrambles, grasps that hand back against his own because this is living.

His heart is humming for the speed of it, a bird or a song, and this is the living denied to him: returned. 

“I told you that the pain would not be needed for much longer, for you to know a thing is real,” T’Challa reminds him, holding his hand firm again, giving him free reign to touch, and so he does, he runs fingertips lightly, then more firmly against human skin, and feels a pulse for all its nuance at a human wrist, not just for the push but for what makes it indicative of life; he feels hair follicles and goosebumps and it’s, it’s— 

“Enough of pain, Bucky Barnes,” T’Challa tells him, soft and steady. “You have had so much more than your share.”

He leads Bucky to the sliding doors, to the terrace beyond, to the sun and the sweetness in the air.

“Feel warmth again,” T’Challa murmurs. “Softness,” as he leads Bucky onto the grass, bare-footed to let the little blades tickle the bottoms of his arches each in their turn. “Feel light, and joy.”

And yes, _yes_.

“Love.”

T’Challa’s final suggestion hits home, and it hurts, but oh: he feels it.

Deeper than he thought he’d ever feel again.

He reminds himself that this is a gift. Such a fucking _gift_.

“All of this is yours, again,” T’Challa says simply, speaking to the beauty before him, this untouched paradise, but then, also: something bigger. Something gritty and familiar and broken and true and shoved tight against his heart where it never wore away, not entirely. Couldn’t, not while he still breathed.

“All of this, is for _you_.”

Bucky closes his eyes, and lets himself breathe that in. Just that simple fact. Waits until he thinks he could believe it, could own it and feel it in the pump of his blood.

He’s not there yet, but it’s a start. And he’ll damn well take it.

_______________________

They begin with the shield, because he knows it, and handles it with ease, but it is not second nature.

It needs to be.

“What do you fight for?” T’Challa challenges him, fully-suited, though his claws never snap forth.

“What’s right.”

T’Challa doesn’t have to shake his head for Bucky to know that’s the wrong answer: too vague. That will get them nowhere.

What _is_ right, anyway?

“What do you fight for?”

Bucky throws the shield again, the arc tighter, more controlled: he’s improving quickly.

“For the little guy.”

T’Challa advances; better, then. That’s a better answer, but still not right.

“What do you fight for?”

Bucky brings the shield down in a heavy slash: uses it for the weapon that it is for the first time, and doesn’t flinch.

“For the right to be free.”

T’Challa’s a hairsbreadth away, and Bucky too is close, close to what he needs, what T’Challa’s trying to lead him toward, he can do it, he can _do_ it—

“What do you _fight_ for?” he pushes once more, harder, and Bucky snaps.

“Choice!” he screams, and whirls the shield in a perfect arc before catching in, burying it in the ground straight at T’Challa's feet in a single, fluid motion, breathless.

T’Challa studies him, and then removes his mask to reveal and smile.

“Choice seems silly,” Bucky says, panting still with the emotion, more than the exertion.

“Silly?” T’Challa shakes his head, and stands before Bucky, gathering Bucky’s hands and pressing them close to Bucky’s own chest, where his heart’s pounding enough to feel even before his touch makes contact. 

“You fight for the very spirit of humanity,” T’Challa tells him, without any hint at irony, or mocking: with full belief in his own conviction. “You fight without banner, without nation, but for what it means to live.”

Bucky swallows, and stares down at the shield still buried in fertile soil, and he laments a little where the grass is torn for the impact.

“And that is the heart of you,” T’Challa continues, with the same level of conviction, and Bucky looks up, then, that heart of him suspended in mid-air for whatever’s about to be said about it, worn and tattered and wasted sonuvabitch that it is. 

“Stripped of all pretense and lies thrust upon you, strings attached to you to move you and enslave,” T’Challa tells him simply, solemnly; “ _this_ is who you are, and what you believe in.” He gestures broadly, looks impressed; perhaps amazed. “Nothing less than the human soul.”

He leans down, and retrieves Bucky’s shield, holds it out to him in offering as he says with a greater certainty than Bucky knows how to fight against: 

“There is nothing _silly_ in _that_.”

_______________________

Bucky eats food better than he could have afforded over the past two years in hiding, despite all the Hydra accounts he skimmed—he remembers how to savor things, and he moans when a morsel touches his tongue in a way that greatly amuses his hosts.

Bucky lies on the grass and listens to water falling, sometimes for hours, and lets the sun touch his skin and change its color, reminds him of long summers on the docks, the gold of his flesh, and the shine of his left arm isn’t unwelcome—is, in fact, almost beautiful.

He touches himself, for the first time in eons, in his rooms, with that same left hand, and he comes thinking of Steve, and it’s neither frantic nor shameful: it’s exquisite, and worshipful, and it breaks his heart even as he spills with a smile on his face and his body slumped heavy against the shower wall.

He relearns himself inch by inch, until light has touched him, until he’s stripped and bathed in deep, cool pools beneath brighter stars than he’s ever seen, until he starts to feel clean again: he doesn’t know what does the trick, exactly, just knows when the impenetrable caking of grime and blood and hate and fear are suddenly gone, and it’s only him, exposed beneath the sky.

And it’s not so bad, honestly. Stained by what fell away, yes, and raw for it, but It’s not so bad. 

To be just _him_.

_______________________

 

“Who do you fight for?”

The question has changed, now; but Bucky’s changed, too. His control with the shield might just surpass Steve’s, now; his eye for the target always superior between them.

“The underdog.”

T’Challa scoffs, dodges a blow.

“Who do you fight for?”

Bucky swings again, but the Panther dances away effortlessly, skillful bastard.

“The defenseless.”

T’Challa tuts, and grabs the far end of the shield at the next attack, and they grapple for a moment, and they put up a damn good fight between them, and maybe Bucky’ll never know if he prevails on his own merits or otherwise, but he prevails.

“Who do you fight for?”

“The forgotten,” Bucky answers, realigning, moving without _making_ a move; “the victims.”

And T’Challa doesn’t like that, apparently, because he’s the one who lashes, now, who presses against the shield used in defense as Bucky fends him off the best he can as T’Challa demands of him:

“ _Who_ do you _fight_ for?”

“Him!” Bucky snarls, and this time it’s entirely his own strength that beats off T’Challa’s attack, that tosses the man flat on his back to the ground. “Him, goddamnit.”

And T’Challa doesn’t rise, and Bucky doesn’t move, except to fall, to crumble to the ground himself and let the shield hang limp from his grasp as he catches his breath.

“Goddamnit, T’Challa,” he huffs; “I’ll always fight for him.”

“A warrior knows his own heart,” T’Challa says, sagely again in that way of his. “Don’t hide from yours.” Bucky can see his smile even though the mask stays in place, for now. “You have one of the good ones, after all.”

That’s debatable, Bucky thinks, but he chuckles in thanks anyway.  
_______________________

T’Challa tells him that he’s ready. They neither of them name what for, but Bucky knows.

He’s always known.

What he doesn’t know, is how to tell when it’s _done_. 

But he doesn’t even have to ask. 

“There is a saying,” T’Challa tells him as he stares at the sunset, a single bag in hand, shield at his back. “My father would use it, sometimes. And his father,” T’Challa looks down with a fond smile; “his father before him, I am told. I cannot remember so far.”

Bucky dwells, for a second, on that legacy. That birthright, and how somehow, he was deemed worth taking a chance on from all that honor, and goodness.

He’s still not sure it all adds up, but hell if it even matters anymore.

“But a man in great mourning once wrote,” T’Challa closes his eyes, hums a bar that’s vaguely recognizable before quoting softly:

“It is well, with my soul.”

And Bucky’s mind goes to pews and hymnals, and oh.

Oh, yes.

“And when you feel that,” T’Challa murmurs, not breaking but instead prolonging the calm sort of spell. “When you feel that through every inch of you, and you know what it means, because you taught _yourself_ , then you will be free again.” He turns to Bucky, gazes at him hard.

“Then you will have healed enough to look yourself in the eyes, in the mirror, and see the heart of you with pride again.” He nods, and turns away; stares, too, at the sunset.

“I believe this.”

Bucky swallows, and closes his eyes, and tries to make sense of his mind for a moment, of his heart for less than even that, because it’s much harder to sort, but he does his best.

And that’s all he can do with this, as well.

“I,” he starts, because he feels as if something must be said. “I will try.”

He meets T’Challa’s eyes in their reflection: not yet with pride, but.

But.

“I will try to believe it, too.”

_______________________

Bucky travels, and finds quickly what he always suspected: he doesn’t have to follow the big news or the global threats—suffering is everywhere. 

Steve’s eyes look back at him from so many faces.

He calls himself Nomad—he doesn’t have a home he’ll allow himself to find, not yet, so it feels like a weight that he needs to push him onward, as well as a badge to own in earnest; the sleeves of his suit—Wakandan design, vibranium enforced—are cut to mold over his arm, and so while the plates are visible, they aren’t so pronounced: they’re an implication, more so than a statement, he guesses.

Close enough.

But he goes to refugee camps, and spends days he can’t count doing what he can with the field medic training he’s got, with the tricks up his vibranium sleeve, auto-injections and self-administered immunizations for travel and emergencies, he uses them all here—he doesn’t need them, after all, the serum taking care of most of his own needs.

He makes friends, of a kind. He learns languages he didn’t know before. He helps deliver a child, and his hands are the first to touch that baby as it enters the world, and maybe the mother kisses his cheek and thanks him too many times.

Maybe he cries himself to sleep with how much he feels, with the fact that the baby’s first touch of this planet hadn’t been flesh, but metal.

And yet.

He moves on, and does the same thing over and again: the medical stores for his arm are always replenished, packages arriving in places he didn’t even realize he’d stop, awaiting him; the idea of eyes upon him from afar an odd comfort where it’d been a threat for so long: that friendly gaze following him as he wandered.

He fearlessly secures information for British Intelligence to take out a dictator, and doesn’t spill a drop of blood for it, save a little of his own, and he’s got plenty to spare, so he doesn’t think it counts.

He fends off an ambush in a civil war in the Balkans: never takes a kill shot with the single gun he carries. Saves hundreds.

Moves on.

He does this for longer than he thinks he could count or comprehend, but time’s a funny thing for him: it might be years, it might just be months. And little by little, it chinks away at what he was made into, to break that armor and reveal it as a chrysalis, to transform him. To make him well again.

Little by little, he saves himself by quietly saving the world.

_______________________

It’s not until he’s too late, one time: the town in flames, the bodies piled and the stench horrific.

A woman runs to him from nowhere, voice rasping through thick smoke, babbling in a language close enough to one he knows for him to understand: her child is missing.

Bucky doesn’t hesitate.

And it’s not until he finds the child, burnt but not badly, shaking and sobbing and scared; it’s not until that child trusts him, metal arm and horror stories and fables of a ghost aside, and crawls into his waiting hold; it’s not until that small human life curls against him so tight that Bucky can feel the rapid drumming of her heartbeat like a mallet on his own that doesn’t ramp up for the fear of him, for the shock of all he’s done, but starts to calm as she sinks into his embrace, as she trusts in him to save her.

That tiny, innocent heart calming, for the presence of _him_.

And then it’s Bucky who’s shaking, and sobbing as he holds a phone to his ear and doesn’t bother with a greeting as he gasps:

“It is well,” and his voice cracks, his heart bursts; “with my _soul_.”

The voice on the other end is a balm for that gaping wound in him, that scar of _feeling_ , of his all-too-human _soul_ :

“To hear that,” T’Challa tells him warmly; “makes it also well with mine.”

_______________________

He goes back to Wakanda, where T’Challa is waiting for him; where T’Challa pulls him into an embrace fit to crush a normal man, but neither of them are normal men, and Bucky clutches back just as fierce: a thank you that can never mean enough.

“You have restored a faith in me,” T’Challa says softly; “of what humanity can _be_.”

Bucky shakes his head, rueful smile on his lips. “You have restored my faith in my _self_.”

And while Bucky doesn’t agree in the slightest, there’s no arguing it when T’Challa smiles, and nods, and says simply:

“Then we are even, Bucky Barnes. Or perhaps I am only just slightly in your debt.”

He doesn’t know if he wants to stay, exactly, but in the end his rooms are clear of any trace of his previous residence, and so he takes that as a sign.

“Perhaps I can repay our slight imbalance,” T’Challa picks the conversation back up on the tarmac; “by hosting you again?”

Bucky smirks at him wide and unabashed. “You askin’ me to visit every now and then, Your Highness?”

T’Challa rolls his eyes, but smiles nonetheless. “Something like that.”

And Bucky takes T’Challa’s hand in both his own, and hopes somehow that the contact can convey just a fraction of all that he feels, of all that he wishes he could give in return as he says, with all the truth inside him:

“I’d be honored.”

T’Challa covers their hands with his own remaining free palm, and lets the silence stretch for a spell, and it means something: an invitation and an assurance and a benediction, and more besides. 

It sets Bucky right at ease. Allows him to be open when T’Challa speaks again, low: just for him.

“A Warrior knows his heart, Barnes,” he reminds Bucky; “go know it again, you have more than earned the right.”

Bucky screws his eyes shut, and does his damnedest to keep his voice steady through the wave of sheer love and loss and longing that consumes him in the blink of an eye.

“My heart,” he falters out the gate; goddamnit. “My heart doesn’t want me,” he finally gets out; “not like that.”

Because Steve couldn’t have. Steve—the Steve Bucky knew—wouldn’t have gone down without a fight and left Bucky here, even if it’s what Bucky needed. His Stevie was too stubborn. His Stevie clawed tooth and nail for the things he _loved_.

But Bucky’s heart was given, he knew that, and maybe just having a heart to give was enough.

Maybe it could be enough, someday.

“Ah, but I disagree,” T’Challa interjects, a knowing purse to his lips. “A heart as strong as yours, to withstand all that it has, to overcome all that it’s known,” T’Challa shakes his head. “It would not have beat so hard, for so long, for nothing.”

He grips Bucky’s shoulder and draws him close, rests their foreheads together and guides the way they breathe.

“I believe this,” he says, and Bucky huffs, because if T’Challa believes it, there’s only one thing Bucky can do.

“I will try.”

So it’s with a shield, a suit of vibranium, a brand new arm and a lease on life that he could never have imagined: it’s with warmth and hope, steadiness and fortitude that he departs, of his own free will, with his own well-soul, to see a man about a fucking _punk_ that makes his whole goddamn heart _sing_.

Bucky probably should have known that it’d all come back to that.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Pools of starlight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6901096) by [Ilyone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilyone/pseuds/Ilyone)




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